


Beastly Whispers

by Shadsie



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Beast Island, Canon Compliance may change, Canon Compliant as of Season 4, Drama, Even Evil Has Loved Ones, F/M, Grief, Hordak introspection, Horror, Loss, Oneshot, Prelude to a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, Somewhat graphic descriptions of long-dead things, Tragedy, season 4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-13
Updated: 2019-11-13
Packaged: 2021-01-29 22:44:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21417898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadsie/pseuds/Shadsie
Summary: There was a reason that Hordak sent his worst enemies to Beast Island.He'd been there before.He knew first-hand what the island did to people.
Relationships: Entrapta/Hordak (She-Ra)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 186





	Beastly Whispers

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Season 4. Spoilers for Season 4 are in effect. This is an attempt at a generally canon-compliant story, but it might not be by Season 5 if more lore about Hordak’s past, the First Ones and possible interactions with the greater Horde are explained in-series.

**Beastly Whispers**  
  
  
Hordak had been to Beast Island – only once, many years ago. It was a place he had first heard of not long after he had been stranded on the backwater that the locals called Etheria. Back then, before he had succeeded in building his empire and was still using diplomacy as an early tactic (trade of advanced technology and skills to get what he wanted) the universal linguistic translators in his system struggled to find a descriptor for the natives’ rumors.   
  
“Hungry Place,” “Place of Vicious Animals” and “Hungry Animal-Mouth” were early names that had come through as closest to what he could understand. The translation cycled through descriptions involving “animal / beast” before finally settling upon “Beast Island.”   
  
His early allies and people who had become his first soldiers told him that it was a terrible place, a forbidden land that sailors avoided. Ships that were tossed there by storms did not return. There had been, apparently, a few survivors’ accounts from people who’d gotten back to civilization on driftwood boats or who had been rescued by brave, foolhardy friends who had kept themselves off the coast. They were tales of vicious monsters and a siren-song. The survivors were also, invariably, madmen, irrevocably damaged by the island. Hordak could not recall any survivor’s tale that had not ended in the poor wretch taking his or her life after telling his story, or succumbing to a venomous creature-bite. He had initially taken “an island that eats your soul” as superstition. He’d learned quickly that Etheria was full of ghost-tales. Investigation was not unwarranted, however, as he’d seen the shifting forest known as the Whispering Woods.   
  
He’d taken a scouting party – something of a scientific expedition - to seek out the island. Given the fear associated with it, would be easy territory to add to his holdings. Perhaps it had some use for him that the primitives were hopeless to see. Scorpion-men and lizard-folk flanked him as he stepped out onto its shore. There were a few standard “humans” as they called themselves in tow, as well. They were well-armed. Ruins rose up through the sea-mist, clearly technological, hunks of old spacecraft. It stood to reason to Hordak that the Etherians did not know what they were looking at when they looked up at these structures. They were old and decayed. The entire place was easily identifiable as a scrap-dump. The Horde had entire planets set aside for that purpose out in the greater universe.   
  
Hordak insisted upon scouting inward while his conscripts were reluctant to leave the shoreline. Small, chattering beasts hissed at him and he hissed back. He kicked more than a few aside.   
  
Winding lights shone upon black tendrils formed from the ooze of leaking chemicals combined with corroded metals. As he walked along, he got an idea of why the place was called “Beast Island.” Being among the winding scrap-forest and in the caverns was not unlike being inside of an enormous bloated and rotting animal carcass, its components destabilizing and returning to the earth.   
  
That was before he saw a living animal that had wandered in off the coast. He found a seal among the black “jungle.” It looked up at him with large eyes and made no attempt to flop away from him or to perform any defensive posture. It stayed starkly still as its body was enveloped by strange tendrils that were actively growing over it.   
  
Hordak approached it. It continued looked up at him with a forlorn stare. He grunted and moved on. He walked past skeletons with dried flesh and sinew stubbornly clinging to the joints and old skulls of giants that were dried and flecking. There were glowing crystals everywhere. The carnage failed to bother him. He’d stepped over too many battlefields, bloody with many colors. The stench of corruption was everywhere, distinctly mechanical with an undercurrent of organic rot.   
  
“Go no farther!” one of his guides cried.   
  
He finally hit an area where humanoid skeletons lined the walls. He’d never forget the one skull with the black vines growing through its eye sockets and nasal passages. It was an interesting specimen.   
  
Data crystals and tech-wreckage caught his eye. Waste though it was, it was the remains of an ancient civilization and it was familiar to him somehow. Had he’d encountered this before his last mental-reset and something remained as a ghost of memory?   
  
A strange noise channeled itself down and through his long ears. He winced. It hurt.   
  
“Come back!”   
  
The sound echoed in his skull and sent the circuitry of his cybernetics on edge. Pain reverberated through his bones, but he felt…compelled. Hordak wandered forward toward the glow he saw among the deep forest.   
  
“You’re going to die!”   
  
That was when he noticed a vine whipping around his left wrist. More grew up his legs, winding over him like hungry worms who’d found a meal too large for them. He grunted and growled at them and tried to free himself. After a few minutes of a futile battle, he simply stood still. He did not know why he stopped. He just didn’t feel like fighting anymore. It was like a paralysis had set into his mental processors. His body could move, but his brain did not want it to. He could feel the tendrils growing over his face and around his ears. They seemed to be finding their way into his armor-connection ports.   
  
If he had a soul, it was frozen over. Everything went dull.   
  
_“You aren’t worthy of it…”_ whispered into his mind.   
  
Oh, yes…his fighting prowess had earned him the status of Second-in-Command. He’d been gifted a limited autonomy program for the sake of making executive decisions in the field. Everything was to go back to Prime, however. Everything was Prime’s. Prime was everything.   
  
_“You thought you could do better? I didn’t sign off on that!”_  
  
He’d saved troops and resources, had he not?   
  
_“Why can I not read your mind on the field? I looked and saw nothing. Obviously, you are a defective unit.”_   
  
He’d tried to keep in touch. He’d modified the robots for the purposes of communication. They’d destroy all resistance AND deliver a record. One of the conquered beings had called this… creativity?   
  
_“Look at you! You’re sick! I’d send you in for recycling, but you are not worthy of even that, are you, little brother? No… you’ve been strong. I’d like to see how you fight while this weak. You’re PERFECT for front-line infantry!”_   
  
Canon-fodder. He’d been the top general and now he was canon-fodder.   
  
_“Who are you?”_ – A red claw was extended to him.   
  
_“Who are you?”_  
  
_“We are.” _  
  
_“We are…I am…Horde…I am…” _  
  
He’d discovered what a name was. To tell the truth, he did not know if the locals had given it to him when he was trying to explain the Horde and had spat and sputtered from his injuries and sickness, delirious and pained, or if he had, indeed, given it to himself for ease of communication.   
  
And this was why he was wrong. This was why he was a blight. The Horde was made up of cells in a body all working as one – Prime was the brain. He – Hordak, the outlier - was a cancer cell. Unworthy of life.   
  
_“You failed. You failed and now you are going to die alone on a backwater planet where people don’t even know the stars! Obscurity! You were nothing to me! Why did I create you? Why were you even born?” _  
  
_“You are scrap.”_   
  
Hordak’s gaze scanned the scrap yard around him.   
  
_“You thought you could live without me little brother?” _  
  
“No, never,” he mouthed.   
  
_“All things are as they should be now. It is time for you to fade. Out of memory, out of existence, out of my sight!” _  
  
“No…Please…I can conquer this world…for you.”  
  
_“I? What is this I?_  
  
“I am.”  
  
_“You are nothing. Did I give you permission to speak?”_   
  
“I AM HORDAK!”   
  
Before he knew what was happening, Hordak was breaking free from the vines. Even as he was screaming out the assertion of his idenity, the clawed hands of one of his guides snipped and pulled at them. Another man, one with five-fingered hands, brandished a knife and cut.   
  
He was dragged, staggering, back to the boat they’d come on. Men were shouting. It all droned in his ears into a sound-soup as thick as the fog around the island. He stared ahead, his body cold. Despair felt like it was clinging to his bones.   
  
“Are you alright?” Someone was shaking his shoulder. He bit his lip to try to bring himself back to reality.   
  
His existence was valid, wasn’t it? He was alive. His companions stared at him as he hung his head and whispered “I am alive.”  
  
“Yes, you are,” one of them said. “Barely. This is why Beast Island isn’t exactly Scorpion Hill’s top vacation-spot!”  
  
The joking made him feel a little better somehow. At the very least, the voices of the Etherians reminded him that he did, in fact, exist – and that he wasn’t going through a reset.   
  
That is what the island felt like: A reset – but not one that assured him that he still had value to Prime and could make up for his mistakes. No… this was just a straight and slow stripping of everything. He’d felt like he’d been flayed down to his bones and to his circuitry. He touched his armored arms to make sure they were still there as he looked back at the island while the guides pushed off and made haste to put distance between them and it.   
  
Hordak had survived his encounter with the “hungry place.” When he’d gained loyalty and power beyond a small circle, and insubordination and traitors could not be dealt with by just snapping a few necks, automated transports with coordinates to Beast Island did the job of keeping order. Some knew the true nature of the island, others only legends. He didn’t mind when Shadow Weaver made up her own stories for the children the Horde had taken, since the true nature of the island would be difficult for young minds to understand.   
  
Exile to the place was the perfect “reward” for traitors and high-profile prisoners. It wasn’t a messy form of execution. Hordak had little taste for getting his hands dirty. Screaming annoyed him and planning deaths was cumbersome, taking time away from his scientific endeavors. Perhaps it was the carefully-hidden weakness of his own body that gave him a dislike of causing the kind of personal and direct bodily harm that he felt would be necessary without a convenient exile. It seemed that he had a not-quite-empathy. When a correction needed to be made, a simple deprivation of the native atmosphere via mechanical means worked to get his point across most of the time. Threats of Beast Island were often enough in and of themselves. When he truly felt the need to send someone there, when all of their options for correction had been depleted, it was the kind of death sentence beyond what he could give if he simply hung, beheaded or electrocuted someone.  
  
Hordak could kill, but he could not bottle suicidal depression.   
  
He knew that anyone he’d sent to the place would get the agony they deserved and his sensitive ears didn’t have to endure their whines and yelps, nor their pitiful begging. 

  
  
________________________________  
  


  
The new recruit, Double Trouble was shape shifting before him, playing a very dangerous game, toying with him. Then, quite casually, they complimented him on his “acting performance.”   
  
_What?_  
  
Hordak almost went deaf, collapsing within his own mind as the chameleon spoke of his “brilliant plan” to have Catra exile Entrapta to Beast Island as a trap for She-Ra, of how he’d pulled off this clueless, betrayed act.   
  
The world crashed.   
  
Catra had sent Entrapta to Beast Island? She had the audacity to lie to him yet again?   
  
And he had believed her.   
  
He had thought so little of Entrapta that he…  
  
He had failed her.  
  
No.  
  


Was this happening?  
  
It had been months since the portal failure. 

  
Entrapta had been gone for months.   
  


Gone.  
  
Gone.   
  
Beast Island.   
  
The hungry place that fed on despair and ate the soul.   
  
A memory from a lifetime ago flashed into Hordak’s mind of that empty-eyed dying seal staring up at him.   
  
The coldness of that place that set into his bones…   
  
The beastly whispers.   
  
An image came to his mind of Entrapta, empty-eyed, staying still, letting the ravening forest take her. Cheerful Entrapta, full of life, just giving up.   
  
_“I’m a failure, too,”_ rang in his mind._ “Adora abandoned me. Catra says she’s my friend but doesn’t talk to me anymore…”_  
  
Breath – or the equivalent he had of it for him – caught in his throat.   
  
_“I like being friends with you, too.”_   
  
It had been months. He wouldn’t have lasted a day if it were not for his guides. He had failed to thank them and he realized that anew.   
  
It had been months. The island had surely consumed her by now. It was too late. Too late!   
  


She was gone.   
  
And he had let this happen to her. He had believed…  
  
Hordak could not remember if he had ever cried in his entire existence. Wet tendrils dripped down his cheeks. Fire welled up in his belly, blooming in his chest. Rage. 

Despair, emptiness and pure, unfiltered rage were all he knew now.   
  
He was charging up his canon before the object of his hate had even entered the room.   
  
He had failed Entrapta utterly, but he would avenge her.   
  
He could not get the image of her out of his mind dying alone, scared, abandoned, looking out at the jungle of corrosion with dull eyes, convinced of her own failures, convinced that she had failed him – and betrayed by someone she had called a friend.   
  
She’d saved her wretched life, too.   
  
He didn’t care what it took. He did not even care if he brought the Fright Zone crashing down and died in the effort: Catra was going to die!   
  
This was all Hordak had left, that and the beastly whispers.   
  
  



End file.
